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Abstract
According to the Conservative Party, the ‘age of egalitarianism is now over’. This article explores the development of egalitarianism in the United Kingdom in the last decade and the threat represented by the Education Reform Act 1988. It focuses on the political struggles over gender and ‘race’ equality in education since the significance of these struggles appears to have been neglected in current reassessments of social democracy. Teacher autonomy, child‐centred learning and freedom of curriculum choice, as defined by social democracy, have been challenged by campaigns for social equality. Yet calls for increased state intervention and more coercive strategies of reform were not conducive to a participatory democratic order. The analysis, therefore, demonstrates the tensions between equality and democracy as political goals within advanced capitalist societies, and suggests that not only liberal, but also the egalitarian approaches of the 1980s require critical re‐evaluation.